The Great Pretender : Always an Outsider, She Bluffed Her Way Inside a Beauty Pageant; That’s When Things Got Ugly

She doesn’t look at all like a beauty pageant contestant, not this too-tall blond whose hair hangs uncombed and whose sallow complexion is still pitted with teen-age acne. “I’ve always thought,” Michelle Anderson says, “that I was ugly as sin.”

But take that face and slather it with mascara and maquillage. Take those lackluster locks and color and curl them into a shining crown of gold. Banish that brown safari dress for a Glitter Gown. And there she is, a potential Miss America.

“So the pageant has taught me that I’m beautiful,” Anderson says, almost snickering, “but in a really ironic way. Because it has nothing to do with makeup or hairdos or anything like that. I just happen to be smart enough to know how to play the game.” And if infiltrating the Miss California pageant, disrupting its televised finale Monday night and spilling what she says are its inside secrets to the media mean knowing how to play the game, then the 21-year-old college junior has it down cold.

Sure, other contestants have criticized the winners, and the pageant itself has been the object of feminist protests for years, even moving from its traditional base to San Diego in order to evade disruptive demonstrators.

But never before had the protesters succeeded in infiltrating the ranks of the contestants itself. And to hear Michelle Anderson tell it, sitting now on the steps of her ramshackle beachfront home, stripped of her title as Miss Santa Cruz County after unfurling a silk scarf that read “Pageants Hurt All Women” and shouting that the winner was anorexic, she did it with as much detachment and deliberation as Kim Philby did betraying his class and country.

Now, as she fields calls from “Good Morning America” and Geraldo Rivera, she plans to write a book and possibly sell movie and television rights to her story as well.

But was her aim really to further the cause of feminism, as she claims, or simply to satisfy her own selfish ambitions, as pageant officials and other contestants charge? Anderson readily admits that she didn’t care about hurting the aspiring actress, Marlise Ricardos, who was crowned Miss California moments after Anderson was dragged from the stage.

“So her big moment was spoiled,” the protester says dismissively. “Well gosh darn. She’s still going to reap all the benefits from being Miss California, whether I say the truth about her or anyone in the pageant system or not. Hurt is a real relative term. She’s hurt herself so much.”

And she didn’t care about betraying her pageant roommate, Renee Kenneth, the 24-year-old Miss Torrance who felt “shocked and hurt” by Anderson’s subterfuge. “I don’t want to say that you meet someone and think that you know them in a week. We laughed together. We studied together. We cried together. And when it came to the title, she was just as ambitious any everyone else.”

So who really is Michelle Anderson, this verbal and verbose one-time high school debating champ who liberally salts her sentences with expletives?

Ask Anderson where she’s from and she answers cryptically, “I’m not really from anywhere.” The daughter of an Air Force colonel, she was born in Georgia and reared in North Dakota, Alabama, the District of Columbia and California.

That constant dislocation was a “very important part” of her adolescence, she maintains, and played a subtle role in her decision to become a pageant double agent. “Whenever we moved, suddenly I was not ‘in’; I was ‘out,’ ” Anderson recalled. “And so I had the experience of being ‘out’ over and over.”

Claiming she was “labeled gifted early on,” Anderson described a childhood in which she saw herself as a “pimply-faced intellectual nerd” who was decidedly less attractive than her two younger sisters and older brother.

In fact, she can recall only one period--more like a “phase”--in junior high school when she was truly popular. “I was ‘in’ because I was a cheerleader type who did the pompon routine,” she remembered. “Then, all of a sudden we moved again, and I was ‘out’ at a time when I shot up to 5 foot 10 1/2 when the boys were still at only 5 foot 6.”

Throughout high school, “I thought I was ugly as sin,” she said. Reinforcing those feelings was the fact that “I’d never had a date in my life. I never even went to the prom. I was so ‘out’ that I never considered myself beautiful.”

Played Down Looks

Later on, she claims, she played down her looks to play up her intelligence.

“If being smart was the only ing I had going for me, then I decided to be super smart. . . . In order to be super smart, well, that meant you had to be ugly. So I didn’t like nice clothes. I didn’t like makeup. And I didn’t like being blond because blond means stupid.”

It was during high school that Anderson recalls feeling “conflicted” emotions about being a woman.

“On the one hand, I hated women. I can honestly say I laughed at them because I thought they were all so damned stupid. And I wasn’t like that and I didn’t understand who was at fault. I just thought I had been given a bad deal here--a man’s brain in a woman’s body.”

But she also began to experience her first stirrings of feminism. “It was a slow process over a few years. I found the more action I would take, the more radical I became.”

While most girls her age wouldn’t respond to wolf whistles from construction workers, “all of a sudden, I decided to say something back. The more I would do that, the more I would think, ‘Damn, I have a lot of individual power.’ And the more power I got, the more assertive I became as a woman.

“And the less dates I got,” she added, “because I was too threatening.”

Attending the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1986, she met Ann Simonton, founder of the Santa Cruz-based feminist group MediaWatch and a former cover model for Sports Illustrated magazine’s annual swimsuit issue.

A former teen-age beauty contestant, the 35-year-old Simonton is known for leading raucous annual protests against the Miss California pageant, held in Santa Cruz for decades until it was moved to San Diego in 1986. Through the years she has drawn attention to her group’s “Myth Kalifornia” protests by such stunts as wearing a gown of bologna (to symbolize her contention that contestants were being treated like pieces of meat). She served 15 days in jail one year for spilling her own blood to protest what she said was a link between pageants and violence against women.

When Anderson saw a flier advertising a slide show Simonton was giving to raise public consciousness about sexism, she decided to attend. “I’d been very interested in how the media exploits women’s bodies to sell products. And I thought this was keen.”

Almost immediately, the two women became close friends. By December, 1986, they were working together--trying to decide how best to protest the upcoming Miss Santa Cruz County pageant. Said Anderson: “We were just thinking about it, and then the idea hit. I thought: What if I enter this? I’m the right age and I can play the part though I’m probably not pretty enough.”

But Simonton was enthusiastic. “She was a model. She knew that makeup could do wonders,” Anderson noted. “But I was already behind schedule.”

From the start, she claims, she saw the titles of Miss Santa Cruz County or Miss California as mere steppingstones. “The plan was to try to go on to Miss America. And if I won Miss America, I was going to see if I could use the icon as long as I could and say everything that I felt and see how long it took before they took my crown away.

“Then I would sue their butts off for violation of my freedom of speech.”

Though she knew very little about the pageant itself, she knew it drew a huge television audience that would see whatever protest she planned to stage.

“There’s this bizarre fascination that I think everyone has because there’s something so fundamentally American about the competition, about beautiful girls, about the icons, about the whole thing,” she said. “It’s just very compelling.”

From her standpoint, however, “I always thought it disgusting.”

Believing that her end justified her means, she never had qualms about deceiving the pageant organizers since, she maintains, “all contestants are forced to lie in pageants. To be the icon, you have to be a liar.”

If anything, she seemed to relish the opportunity to fool them into thinking she was acting out a “childhood fantasy.” Only she was really acting.

“I had been involved in high school and state theater productions. So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be fun to pull off as an acting job?’ ”

She began her by buying Teen and Seventeen magazines for the “mechanical stuff. I’m very smart and I pick up on things easily and I knew exactly how to make myself look like that. I was savvy enough to know that I had to look good.”

But that took money she didn’t have. Still, with the help of friends, she bought makeup. She bleached her hair. She went to a tanning salon. She bought an evening gown.

And, to fulfill the talent portion of the pageant, she scraped together several hundred dollars for singing lessons, “though I really don’t have a voice at all.”

In the end, she was second runner-up in a field of less than a dozen women competing for the 1987 Miss Santa Cruz County title. She chalked it up as a “learning experience. I did everything wrong,” she sighs.

Learned the Tricks

Even something as seemingly simple as slipping into a bathing suit, she said, involved tricks she hadn’t known. “I didn’t know that I had to lift my breasts with duct tape. I didn’t know that I had to spray my bottom with Pro-Grip. I didn’t know that I had to get a swimsuit with the Miss America ‘look,’ which was a modest cut.” (Pageant officials denied Tuesday that contestants used duct tape.)

She bought every book about the pageant she could find. She exchanged her satin “prom” dress for a “glitter gown.” She restyled her hair, took more singing lessons and dropped 15 pounds.

This year, she won “hands down,” she boasts, sweeping both the interview and the evening gown parts of the local competition on Feb. 20. “There were many people who were technically more talented. But I knew I would win interview because no one intelligent ever--or rarely--enters. And I knew I would win evening gown because I had bought the right glitter dress. And no one had more stage presence or had the act down or knew the game better.”

Then the really hard part began: Could she maintain her double life?

First, she says, had to hide from pageant organizers the fact that she not only had a boyfriend but was living with him as well. “We definitely had to keep that undercover,” admits Sam Schultz, a 32-year-old Santa Cruz carpenter who began dating Anderson shortly before she won the contest.

Or as Anderson more crudely put it with a laugh, “I had to pretend that Sam was living here with his fiancee. The rules say virginal meat is the only appropriate meat to display. But the pageant people didn’t investigate too intensely, and I didn’t offer any information.”

Some of her friends knew what she was plotting, others didn’t. Anderson estimates that up to 60 people were in on the scam. “But it kept growing and growing,” she said. “Because it was such an interesting story, nobody could keep their mouth shut.”

Anderson says her parents were “very supportive throughout,” even driving to San Diego for the pageant. She refused to make them available to reporters, however, and Renee Kenneth, her roommate during the pageant, doesn’t believe they knew about the protest plans. “I’m sure they’re very heartbroken about this,” said Kenneth.

Anderson admits that “they thought it was totally weird at first. They said, ‘Michelle, you’re really putting yourself on the line.’ ” The plan didn’t sit well especially with her father, a vice wing commander at Carswell Air Force Base, Tex., before retiring. “He’s very much Air Force,” she explained. “A rigid person--very straight, completely honest. In his eyes, you don’t violate social norms. And if this is doing anything, it’s violating social norms.”

But, after her protest Sunday night, she claims he told her, “Michelle, I’m proud of you. You did what you needed to do.”

After winning the Santa Cruz title--and capturing the state’s biggest pageant scholarship award, $3,000--Anderson says that getting ready for the state pageant was even more grueling. For one thing, officials kept nagging her about her weight.

A local contest official even asked her to start wearing a girdle, she claims. “They never said, ‘You’re too fat.’ They would say, ‘Hmm, you really need to tone up sweetheart. That cellulite looks awful !’ And meanwhile, I’m exercising my butt off. So what they were really telling me is that I needed to stop eating.”

Anderson claims that, as a result, she had to diet from her “normal” weight of 150 pounds--”where I look healthy and feel good”--down to 140 and even 135. “And still they didn’t think that was thin enough,” she complained.

Finding fault with her figure was one thing. But Anderson says she really became riled when reservations were expressed about something even more basic--her personality.

“Pageant people all the time would tell me that I was a bit assertive. Well, almost--gasp!--aggressive,” she says theatrically. “They would tell me things like, ‘You really need to tone yourself down because girls are supposed to be dainty. And you’re blowing people away with your presence.’ ”

This, probably more than anything else, almost jeopardized her protest plans. “Because I was always slipping. I’d just say something honest.”

She says she also had a hard time keeping up a front when she made a few public appearances as Miss Santa Cruz County. “It was bizarre. It was very bizarre,” she said. “In three months, I opened a gas station. I went to a recital for all these little girls who were wearing fishnet stockings and a lot of makeup. You know, things like that. And because you wore the crown, people think, ‘Wow!’ ”

What they didn’t see, she says, was the painful push-up bra she had had to purchase from Frederick’s of Hollywood. “I have very big breasts and the pageant organizers were always telling me that my breasts were too low. They wanted them higher. So now,” she said, looking down at her chest, “I know a hell of a lot about bras.”

For comfort, she turned to Simonton. But she found that the protest leader “was not terribly supportive psychologically a lot of the time. It really is a personal thing. You’re out there on your own. And nobody knows really what you’re going through. So I found that frustrating.”

However, the two women kept their contacts to a minimum “because we had agreed it was too risky.”

Sometimes, she had dreams about winning in San Diego and then going all the way to national pageant in Atlantic City, N.J. Sometimes they were nightmares. “I didn’t know which was the worst scenario.”

There also were times she longed to shout how she really felt about the crown on her head. “I wanted to project some honesty to these people that being the icon was not what I wanted to do,” Anderson said. But she decided that the “important thing was that I play the game in order to find out the inside story.”

Once she got to San Diego for the statewide pageant, she found out that the inside story centered around Marlise Ricardos, a perennial runner-up whom the other contestants considered the odds-on favorite to be crowned the first Miss California of Latino heritage.

It is when Anderson discusses Ricardos that she loses the dispassionate, I-was-just-in-it-for-the-game demeanor she says she so carefully cultivated. “She was the infamous Marlise. She was the one. That was clear,” Anderson said with a sudden burst of rancor. “Everyone knew this was her swan song. She’s 26. This was her last year to win.”

Ricardos, who was making her fourth attempt to win the crown, has steadfastly refused to respond to Anderson’s taunts, including Anderson’s description of her as an anorexic, vitamin-deficient, physically bruised and emotionally battered professional contestant.

“Do I look like I’m starving and ragged?” she confidently asked reporters at a news conference Monday, shaking her heard in mirth. “I’ve always believed in a good healthy diet, and have worked hard to stay in shape. I think that’s really important.”

For once the insider, Anderson gleefully dishes out stories of what she says were the aspiring actress’ health problems, even boasting that she tried to get close to Ricardos by appearing to be sensitive and supportive.

Ricardos, she claims, confided that she kept “anorexically thin” only by starving herself. Another time, “she talked to me about the bruises all over her body,” Anderson maintained. “Every single contestant talked about her bruises the entire week. That was the issue.”

At rehearsals, Anderson claims that the winner kept her body sheathed in warm-up suits because her legs were covered with greyish brown splotches, the result of a vitamin deficiency. “They were all over the place,” Anderson chortled. “It was funky. Really funky. But it was really strange.”

Anderson says Ricardos covered up the bruises with “heavy makeup” and that in the talent competition, when Ricardos was singing an emotion-laden song from the hit musical “Les Miserables,” she dressed up in a peasant costume and painted “fake bruises” onto her face to make her character seem more dramatic.

“It couldn’t have been better,” Anderson said gleefully.

Better for whom? Anderson’s roommate, Rene Kenneth, wonders--and calls nearly all of Anderson’s allegations about Ricardos “ludicrous.”

“She was one of the hardest-working contestants I’ve ever met in my life and one of the most successful in the pageant’s history. So it may be somewhat intimidating to know that you’re competing against someone who has so much experience,” Kenneth noted pointedly.

Asked whether Anderson’s allegations were concocted because she hadn’t done as well as Ricardos in the pageant, Kenneth would say only, “It could have been.”

Anderson herself smiles wryly when the notion of sour grapes are mentioned. “OK,” she said, turning silent for a moment. “I thought of that before, obviously. That’s what pageant people say about all protesters: They’re a bunch of ugly fat women who couldn’t get a date if they wanted to.

“So that’s the standard response to any questioning of the beauty standard . . . that you’re ugly.”